CTO Universe

Text Editor

When it comes to my choice of editor, I find that I’m a nomad. I’m always switching around based on the needs of my current project and the editor I’m using. If I squint hard enough, VSCode starts to look like Emacs. Over time, I’ve found a few editor features I can’t live without.

After spending a bit of time learning Emacs, I’ve found it has a widespread compatibility with a lot of the basic movement and editing commands. Spending a bit of time learning these commands can make you more effective in a variety of places, even if you don’t use Emacs as your preferred editor.

The Pragmatic Programmers advise us to “use a single editor well,” letting it “…be an extension of your hand.” If you’ve ever watched an experienced developer, it can be quite dispiriting to see just how effectively and quickly they can work. IDEs both old and new have such a dizzying array of facilities that it […]

I’ve long been a fan of Stuart Sierra’s reloaded workflow. When I’m working on a ClojureScript project that doesn’t use Figwheel or another tool to assist with live code reloading, this is the pattern I reach for to help manage iterative and interactive development.

I spend a lot of my day working on the command line, from file navigation to version control to remote work on servers over SSH, and anywhere in between. I’ve found that even small improvements to my workflow significantly add up over time to provide big productivity boosts.

While refactoring my current project, I needed to edit some fixture files that were used to populate data in a couple of UI components. Before diving straight in, I looked at these files and wondered how many ways there were to edit them.

I’ve been using Vim as as my primary text editor for a little over a year now, and I’d like to share some of my favorite commands that I’ve discovered during that time. I’ll focus on sharing commands over configuration, so they can be used in any Vim environment.

Until recently, I had done all of my coding in IDEs and GUI text editors. From Notepad++ to Visual Studio and Xcode, I felt like my text-editing toolset was more than adequate for the work I needed to do. I knew about Vim and Emacs, but they both seemed like esoteric, rocket science editors that only […]

For almost a year now, I have been using Spacemacs, an Emacs distribution designed to make Vim users and newcomers to Emacs comfortable in Emacs, as my daily text editor. I was initially hooked by the nearly flawless Vim emulation, which is the best I have used in any text editor. After I had gotten my […]